There is one thing, and one thing only, that will decide whether your idea is a success or not. We’ll get to that soon.
The brutal and cruel truth is that no one is out there will hand you money for nothing. The only money you will ever get for nothing is the money that your parents give you or maybe an aunt or uncle or grandparent.
It might sound harsh, but listening to advice at tea parties, in bar rooms, at Saturday afternoon braais, being bedazzled by consultants or reading get-rich-quick magazines and books won’t get you very far.
It will take a long time to come up with a product and then to develop it into something that can be sold. It doesn’t matter if it’s a jersey, a bottle of jam, an iPhone app or a service for maintaining and cleaning coastal properties.
When you have fallen in love with your product or service then is the time to face cruel reality. Will your product or service be liked or desired by other people? This is where you test your product or service in a trial market run to determine its viability.
If this test shows promise, then take a deep breath and pat yourself generously on the back but don’t crack open the champagne.
You’ve come a long way. Now comes the real test where you go to battle in the marketplace. This takes courage and cunning.
But before you don your superman or wonderwoman suit and dive into the wild and fickle marketplace, do your numbers. Many business owners go through the whole process of selling their product or service only to come out with less money than they put into their misadventure. This makes a mockery of all their effort.
Charge as high as you can, make a fat profit margin and do everything you can to get repeat sales because that’s what determines volume and value. It goes against the grain of what the goody two-shoes are telling you but this is the reality, cruel and harsh as it is.
We have now come to the part you’ve been waiting for. Whatever you do to come up with a business idea and develop it and then put it into the marketplace and perhaps even make an ongoing business of it, you must remember that it’s all about the money.
The one thing that will decide whether your idea is a success or not is to have a paying customer. This means that someone will pay money to buy your product or service from you because it meets a need that they have.
It is easy to say this but it’s another matter to accomplish this. We not talking about family, friends or an aunt buying your product, we are talking about a stranger, someone who has a need for your product and out of all the other solutions to the problem or want, they have, they will buy your product.
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